Tictail Releases API And Internal Tools For 3rd Party Devs, Stores Numbers Take Off

Tictail is a more unusual e-commerce startup in that it is using its venture capital backing to power ahead on creating a platform which is super-easy to create a shop on. Now it’s allowing third-party developers to build applications for the site.
The Tictail App Store will enable developers to reach online store owners with their applications. An innovation compared to others in the space is the Tictail feed, which prompts Tictail users on a range of issues including customer service, social media, and other tasks depending on their activity. This allows Tictail to recommend specific apps to store owners depending on when they are likely to need them. Handy if you are an app developer
Carl Waldekranz, CEO of Tictail says the feed means the “apps find you”. So for instance, a shop owner might se “Last week you had 3 dropped carts, total value 150$. So you can they install the “Abandoned Carts” app at $10, snd so on.
Apps for ecommerce have been around for a long time. Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce all enable plugins. The difference with Tictail is that they are going “beyond” a mere open API, making available to same tools they use internally, including the UI kit (which is how Tictail looks and feels). This allows developers to create apps that work a lot better than just having access to an API.
As with Apple’s model, Tictail takes a standard 30% cut of all revenue from applications distributed via the Tictail App Store.
The API, SDK and UI Kit, and some launch apps are kicking off this week. So for instance, Zopim, a large live chat tool; Yotpo, a social review service; Klarna, a fast growing Swedish payment alternative; Sendicate, ‘email made easy’; and Sellfy for digital downloads.
To date Tictail stretches across over 110 territories globally and has seen 23,000 stores created since its launch in May 2012.
You can contrast this with Bigcommerce, founded 2009 which nows has 36,000 stores, and Shopify, founded in 2005 which has 60,000.
The startup has raised $1.57 million to date from the likes of Balderton Capital and Angels including serial investor Klaus Hommel and Gustav Söderström, Chief Product Officer of Spotify.

1 inShare15 Nix Is A Smartphone Colour Sensor Plus App That Lets You Scan & Save Favourite Shades

WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE THROUGH HERE

Kickstarter

The army of Bluetooth-powered auxiliary hardware being built by hardware startups to extend the native capabilities of smartphones shows no signs of slowing its  march. Meet Nix: a colour sensor that lets you scan an object and get its exact colour data signature sent to the corresponding app on your phone so you can maintain a palette of preferred shades — and even track down an exact tin of paint.
The sensor’s Canadian creators say their device is much more accurate than using your phone’s on board camera to grab colour data, firstly because it’s purpose-built for accurate colour scanning and is “calibrated to return exact/specific colour values”. And secondly because it blocks out all ambient light — meaning the true shade can be captured, i.e. unaffected by shadows or changes in lighting conditions.
That’s the ultimate aim. For now, Nix’s creators are seeking $35,000 in crowdfunding on Kickstarter to get their promising prototype plus iOS and Android apps to market. With 29 days left to run on their funding campaign they’re already approaching half that funding amoung, with more than 150 backers on board, so things are looking good so far.
Nix is designed to replace old school colour swatches and paint decks, and has obvious applications for interior decorators, and designers and artists of all stripes — anyone who cares about and plays with colour — but its creators also envisage other possible use-cases, such as using a colour scan to determine the ripeness of fruit, say. Or scanning skin-tone to develop custom make-up.
The sensor can be used to scan the colours of fabrics, as well as solid coloured surfaces like paints, albeit they note that patterned fabrics may return an average colour tone if the pattern is tighter than the sensor aperture (approximately the diameter of a nickel).
Nix’s makers, who secured an R&D grant to fund their initial prototyping work (both the sensor hardware and software on a development PC), say they intend the device to be hackable, so are making it open source — noting that possible ‘hack-lications’ could include machine vision for a line-following robot, a greenhouse system with humidity, temperature and light-sensing, or a push-notification for when your fridge is opened.
As well as allowing Nix users to view data on the colour they just scanned, the apps will include the ability to save a scanned colour swatch and add notes to it; view a colour in RGB, HSL, HSV, Lab, XYZ, HTML, or CMYK; convert the colour to other media such as wall paints, oil paints, make-up, watercolour, wood stain, automotive paint etc; select a particular brand associated with the media type you’re after and get directions to the nearest store where you can buy the paint.
How much is Nix going to set you back? This sensor plus apps are up for grabs for CAD$99 on Kickstarter — with eventual RRP expected to be $199. If they hit their funding goals, these makers are aiming to ship Nix by February 2014.

 

DeveloperAuction Rebrands As Hired.com To Make Recruiting Suck Less For Everyone

DeveloperAuction, which launched in 2012 to revolutionize the engineer recruiting market, is today rebranding itself as Hired.com, and putting its sights on a much larger target covering designers, data scientists and more.
The idea is pretty straightforward: companies can bid on candidates, who then get to see the company’s offer before accepting or declining an interview; companies must honor their highest offer to a particular candidate, and the potential employees are not bound to accept the highest offer (or any offer). DeveloperAuction takes a fee from companies, and offers a bonus to employees once the candidate accepts an offer.
A year ago, co-founder Matt Mickiewicz told me that DeveloperAuction was the “first transparent marketplace for recruitment.” Now, Mickiewicz tells me, “We see an opportunity that’s much bigger than developers and engineers.”
Mickiewicz says DeveloperAuction was too limited, as it implied that the site was just for engineers, and notes that the auction part of the site had negative connotations, as many employers thought that the highest bid won the talents of the best engineers. Mickiewicz has told me on multiple occasions that a majority of engineers do not accept the highest monetary offer that they receive, but evaluate offers on a variety of factors.
He explains that the company spent six months searching for a new name once it realized that DeveloperAuction was too limiting. The company hired an external consulting company and almost pulled the trigger on a few deals before they fell apart at the last minute. Mickiewicz notes that the Hired.com domain was “the most expensive option” for the company, but ultimately conveys the company’s mission the best.
The company raised $2.7 million from NEA, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and John Suliman’s Step Partners in March. Mickiewicz says most of that money is “still in the bank.” He added that the company, which is now up to 22 employees, is on a multi-million dollar run-rate for 2013, but declined to discuss further specifics on the company’s financial situation.
Recruiting is consistently a challenge for tech companies, from Apple and Google to the youngest startups. I’ve seen a wide variety of solutions to the issue, but none as impressive as DeveloperAuction. And with the company’s new name, it can take on more than Silicon Valley recruiters, as DeveloperAuction seeks to disrupt the worldwide recruiting model for every industry.
Earlier this summer, the company opened its auctions to designers and interns. Mickiewicz tells me that shortly after the company opened to data scientists a few months ago, he hired a data scientist off DeveloperAuction to work at DeveloperAuction.
DeveloperAuction has added over 250 companies since May, bringing the total approved employers using DeveloperAuction to over 560. The company is still approving employee applications by hand, and whittled down over 3,000 applications to 200 engineers for the platform last month.

inShare17 Cinemacraft Raises $1.5M From NTT DoCoMo, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp And 500 Startups

Cinemacraft, a startup that wants to replace static video thumbnails with its interactive Videograms, has raised a $1.5 million strategic funding round from investors NTT DoCoMo, Turner Broadcasting’s Media Camp and 500 Startups. Combined with an earlier seed round of $500,000 from 500 Startups and angel investors, this brings Cinemacraft’s total funding raised to date to $2 million.
Founded in July 2012 and based in Tokyo, Cinemacraft’s platform allows publishers to promote content with “Videograms,” or interactive images that highlight different clips from a video instead of the usual thumbnail. Cinemacraft says this gives its clients more opportunities for monetization and marketing on social media platforms. Videograms also allow publishers to create a visual summary of their video’s content, which gives them a better chance at enticing viewers than with a single freeze frame. An algorithm is used to determine which frames are shown on a Videogram, which is written completely in HTML5 to work across different platforms and products.

 Follow link to watch videos

Once a Videogram is published, viewers can comment on and share individual clips, enabling publishers to see what parts of the video are getting the most engagement. Ads can also be placed within the Videogram, which is automatically refreshed based on which frames are the most popular. Cinemacraft says another advantage of Videograms is that they help content grab more eyeballs, since many viewers will close a video within 10 seconds if they think it’s boring. Instead of worrying about how to make the first few seconds the most attention-grabbing, content creators can focus instead on making sure that the entire video is engaging.
Cinemacraft has run campaigns for clients including Fox Pictures, Sony Pictures, Capitol Records and other music labels. The startup says it will use its latest round of funding to scale globally, improve its platform and expand its core team.

Dafiti, Rocket Internet’s Latin American Fashion Portal, Gets $70M From Ontario Teachers

Earlier this year, when Rocket Internet announced a new injection of $500 million into its Germany-based startup incubator, co-founder Oliver Samwer told me that a large focus for it would be emerging markets like Latin America. Today comes some news about how that strategy is taking shape: Dafiti, a Rocket Internet-backed fashion commerce site based out of Brazil, is announcing a new investment of $70 million to continue building out its business. It comes from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), a Canadian investment fund that has made other notable tech investments, including a $400 million round in Chinese e-commerce site 360Buy.com.
Rocket Internet confirmed to me that OTPP is the sole investor in this round. It takes total funding for Dafiti to $225 million, and puts OTPP among the company’s biggest shareholders, with others including JP Morgan and Quadrant Capital Advisors. It also comes on the back of a smaller (but strategic) investment of $10 million that Dafiti picked up earlier this year from the Leon Group consortium of shoe brands in Mexico.
Dafiti first opened for business in Brazil in 2011. Riding a swelling wave of middle class consumers in the region, the company has expanded quickly and now operates also in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. As with many other e-commerce startups (and those in the Rocket portfolio), Dafiti declines to disclose its actual revenue revenues or any other details on profitability. A spokesperson tells me that the Dafiti gets over 25 million monthly unique visitors, with 2,000 brands and 125,000 products across its five sites.
The bigger opportunity is to take Dafiti to more markets in Latin America, but this funding will be used primarily to build out what Dafiti has already established, not expand further internationally.
“We will use this money to strengthen our customer service and our product assortment,” Dafiti co-founder Philipp Povel noted in a statement. “All in all, this impressive funding helps us to bring Dafiti to the next level and fulfill on our strategic objective to change the way people in Latin America buy fashion, lifestyle and sports products.”
There is some logic to that, since Dafiti has already established itself in five of the biggest e-commerce markets in the region. In Brazil alone, sales from e-commerce sites, led by those specialising in fashion, are projected to grow 25% in 2013, having added 10 million consumers in 2012, according to e-bit. It also predicts that by 2015, 39% of internet users in Brazil (31.6m people) will be making at least one purchase online.
A spokesperson from Rocket Internet tells me that this is the first investment from OTPP in one of its ventures. But it may not be the last: the German incubator has a strong track record for repeat business from the likes of JP Morgan, Kinnevik, Summit, Access and more. On top of that, OTPP — which in December 2012 recorded $129.5 billion in assets under management — has been making a stronger effort to diversify its investments into new markets. Most recently, that has included (along with the 360Buy deal) a new office in Asia to expand its presence there.
“Supported by a growing middle class, huge consumption potential and significant growth in online and mobile access, Dafiti is well positioned to succeed in online retail in Brazil and Latin America,” Wayne Kozun, SVP, public equities, at OTPP, said in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with Dafiti’s successful management team.”
Rocket Internet, it should be noted, has some 75 startups in operation worldwide at the moment across six continents, expanding widely beyond its European origins. In Latin America, it’s active in eight countries, and has been making strong use of one basic building block of its e-commerce business model: building out on economies of scale by consolidating logistics for several of its operations (not unlike what Amazon does with its operations). Brazil, for example, is home to 15 different Rocket Internet startups, including Dafiti.

That Was Fast: Nokia Draws Down The $2B In Convertible Bonds Offered By Microsoft Earlier This Week

That Was Fast: Nokia Draws Down The $2B In Convertible Bonds Offered By Microsoft Earlier This WeekIf we needed some more confirmation of how urgent the financial situation was over at Nokia, we got a glimpse of it today. The company announced that it would be drawing down the

View the Original article

OS X Mavericks Most Likely Arriving In October, Reports Claim, Perhaps Alongside Haswell MacBook Pros

OS X Mavericks Most Likely Arriving In October, Reports Claim, Perhaps Alongside Haswell MacBook ProsApple's next-generation operating system for desktops, OS X Mavericks, is already in the hands of developers, but we likely won't see version 10.9 make its way to consumer devices ahead of October. Some rumors had suggested Apple might ship the OS at its iPhone even next week, or another time during September, but both 9to5Mac and AllThingsD are now reporting late October for Mavericks' arrival.articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378462943 --

View the Original article

Now UK Nationwide, The £100M Angel CoFund Is Able To Super-Charge Angel Syndicates

100M Angel CoFund Is Able To Super-Charge Angel SyndicatesUK startups raising financing have a new route to funds in the shape of a government-backed fund which can supercharge an Angel round with extra funds. The Angel CoFund is a UK government-backed

View the Original article

CrunchBase Has A New Mobile Site, Is Bigger Than Ever

CrunchGovCrunchUGuidesSmartphonesTabletsDigital CamerasLaptopsHeadphonesEventsCrunchBase Hot topicsYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftDisrupt SF 2013

View the Original article

Microsoft Untethers OneNote For iPad From The PC, Now Lets Users Create New Notebooks On The Go

Microsoft Untethers OneNote For iPad From The PC, Now Lets Users Create New Notebooks On The GoMicrosoft's OneNote note-taking app for iPad and iPhone got a small but important update today that finally makes the iPad version a completely stand-alone experience. Until now, you couldn't create new notebooks from the iPad, so you were always forced to go back to the desktop or web version sooner or later. With today's update, Microsoft is adding this feature, as well as the ability to finally add, rename and delete sections in existing notebooks on the iPad.articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378464323 --

View the Original article

Energy Excelerator, The Accelerator For Clean Energy Startups, Receives $30M From The Navy

CrunchGovCrunchUGuidesSmartphonesTabletsDigital CamerasLaptopsHeadphonesEventsCrunchBase Hot topicsYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftDisrupt SF 2013

View the Original article

Cory Booker Is Stepping Down From Waywire's Board As The Company Seeks A New CEO

Cory Booker Is Stepping Down From Waywire’s Board As The Company Seeks A New CEONewark mayor and Senate candidate Cory Booker is announcing today that he will be stepping down from the board of the company that he founded last year, according to a source familiar with the campaign's plans. The departure leaves just one of Waywire's three co-founders at the company, which is still in private beta and in search of a new CEO.articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378468543 --

View the Original article

This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Disrupt <3′s Hardware, Nokia Goes To The Mall, And Galaxy Gear

This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Disrupt<3′s Hardware, Nokia Goes To The Mall, And Galaxy GearTechCrunch Disrupt starts on Monday, so that's on all our minds for this week's TC Gadgets Podcast. Hardware Alley showcases gadget startups on September 11, and if you're still looking for hardware fixes there have been plenty this week, including Microsoft acquiring Nokia's devices wing, and Samsung's new Galaxy Gear smartwatch.articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378468855 -- hardware,="" nokia="" goes="" to="" the="" mall,="" and="" galaxy geartechcrunch="" disrupt="" starts="" on="" monday,="" so="" that's="" on="" all="" our="" minds="" for="" this="" week's="" tc="" gadgets="" podcast.="" hardware="" alley="" showcases="" gadget="" startups="" on="" september="" 11,="" and="" if="" you're="" still="" looking="" for="" hardware="" fixes="" there="" have="" been="" plenty="" this="" week,="" including="" microsoft="" acquiring="" nokia's="" devices="" wing,="" and="" samsung's="" new="" galaxy="" gear="" smartwatch.articlefriday,="" september="" 6th,="" 20131378468855="">

View the Original article

Dots Implements Its First-Ever, In-Game, $ponsor$hip

Dots Implements Its First-Ever, In-Game, $ponsor$hipbetaworks-backed Dots has today announced its very first sponsorship/native advertising deal with GE. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the sponsorship, Dots is releasing a special update with a new version of gameplay called Gravity Mode. articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378470184 --

View the Original article

Gillmor Gang Live 09.06.13 (TCTV)

Gillmor Gang Live 09.06.13 (TCTV)Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Keith Marks, John Taschek, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session today at 1pm Pacific. articleFriday, September 6th, 20131378472805 --

View the Original article

Keaton Row, An E-Commerce Site That Pairs Busy Ladies With Personal Shoppers, Raises $1.6 Million In Seed Funding

Keaton Row, An E-Commerce Site That Pairs Busy Ladies With Personal Shoppers, Raises $1.6 Million In Seed FundingarticleFriday, September 6th, 20131378475808 --

View the Original article

Shutterfly Has Acquired Photo Printing Company R And R Images

Shutterfly has acquired R and R Images. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
R and R Images, a private company that was founded in 1986, specializes in digital printing and photo products. Shutterfly focuses on photo books, stationary, wedding invitations, and other personal goods.
Shutterfly said the acquisition will “enhance the company’s enterprise and consumer product innovation, design and printing capabilities.”
Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold also noted:

“As Shutterfly continues to grow, we are making additional strategic investments in our manufacturing footprint focused on providing our customers with innovative, high quality personalized products while efficiently scaling and managing our costs. We are excited to combine R&R Images’ product innovation and expertise in premium, flexible printing with Shutterfly’s manufacturing scale and infrastructure to enhance our capabilities and continue delighting our enterprise clients and consumers.”

The company announced that it gave an inducement grant to R and R Images’ founder Rod Key. The grant consists of up to 38,492 shares of Shutterfly stock vested over three years as long as Key stays with Shutterfly. At the time of publication, Shutterfly’s stock was at $51.96 per share, making the total shares worth about $2 million.
Earlier this year, Shutterfly acquired cloud-based photo and video storage platform ThisLife. We heard Shutterfly shelled out around $25 million for ThisLife, although he company did not disclose details of that acquisition either.

The New New Foursquare, And Twitter’s Blue Lines Problem

This weekend, summer is sadly coming to a close (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least.) But all is not lost! At least we still have CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most interesting tech news stories from the past seven days. This time around, Leena Rao, Anthony Ha and I discussed the ins and outs of Apple’s new iPhone trade-in program, the latest big update to the Foursquare app (and the rumors of a possible Microsoft investment), and Twitter’s latest redesign with lots of controversial blue lines.